Month: February 2011

More and more, technologists are applying their brain power to government from the inside, and not just among legislators — state staff are getting wise, too. In New York in 2008, a team of open-government technologists that techPresident knows well, including then-state Senate CIO Andrew Hoppin and transparency genie Noel Hidalgo, came in to the state capitol in Albany and radically opened its technology infrastructure. Besides shifting the Senate to more open-source solutions, like Drupal, they also opened its data, live-streamed Senate sessions, made data on bills and votes more easily accessible, and even published the Senate’s payroll online. They also, it should be noted, orchestrated a transfer of that infrastructure to the Republican Party’s choice of staff — so that while the leadership changed, the transparency did not.

As I get older the less I care about people’s opinion of me, and feel that my actions should say more about me than what objects I decided to purchase. Once I realized that it was hard to justify keeping these things and I decided they’d be better off in the hands of someone who hadn’t read them and could actually benefit from possessing them. Am I the only one coming to this conclusion? Do you have shelves full of books and media? Do you still use them?

Bloom is creating a new type of visual discovery experience on tablets, media consoles, and modern browsers that will provide you with playful, explorable, visually compelling views on personally relevant information from services like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and iTunes. These Bloom Instruments aren’t merely games or graphics. They’re new ways of seeing what’s important.

as active participants in the open-source network since 2001, we wanted to build an exceptional product for government that addresses public-sector needs for content management, citizen engagement and data transparency – that’s why we created OpenPublic. OpenPublic is an emerging project that provides an open source platform to build government websites on Drupal. It is being built initially by Phase2 Technology as a Drupal distribution, a free, downloadable pre-packaged version of Drupal designed to address specific needs – in this case common government use cases. When installed, it gives you a Drupal site(s) that is pre-built with the stuff a government site needs. It is being developed with attention to considerations like Federal requirements for security, privacy, and best practices for a modern open government oriented site (e.g. citizen engagement and feedback).

That’s not to say State’s approach doesn’t have its virtues. “Venture capital firms own half your company, while [here] the U.S. government owns nothing,” Freitas says, “so there is that benefit if you figure out how to make it work.”

Michael: Yes, exactly. There really is a sexist undertow to the whole thing. Sort of like the expression “You suck” which (am I wrong) presumes that sucking is a bad thing, but everyone does it except the straight dudes. Ergo, sexist and homophobic, but invisibly so.

Me: OMG is it really, do you think?! I never even thought about sucking literally? Or maybe I thought it was like your grandmother teaching you to suck eggs. (Not that I ever understood that.)

Reporters Without Borders is outraged by the destructive attack that 50 masked gunmen carried out at 2:30 a.m. on 20 February on the headquarters of Naliya Radio and Television (NRT) in the compound known as “German Village” in Sulaymaniyah, in northern Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan region, to prevent it from continuing to cover unrest in the city